Tamed by the Outlaw

by Michelle Sharp

  Her über-intelligent comeback was to stick out her tongue.

  “Is that your ante for the next game? Because if so, things just got serious.”

  Since Jessie and Grayson were both wearing mics, the crowd could hear all their banter. After his last comment, her fans laughed and became louder. She was glad he was being a good sport and playing along. The problem was, everyone wanted Grayson to win. Even her die-hard fans were rooting for him because if she lost, she owed everyone another book.

  Lila was right. Grayson had suckered her good. She’d bet four or five months’ worth of work. The only thing Grayson had to lose was the thirty seconds it took to write out a check.

  She looked over at Lila, who merely rolled her eyes and sucked down another Jim Beam. Perhaps all business negotiations were best left to Lila from now on.

  “This is it,” Spencer announced. “The final showdown. With Team Jessie James at four hundred and seventy-five dollars and Mr. Publisher with five hundred and twenty-five. The player left with the most money at the end of this hand wins the game.”

  Spencer dealt two cards facedown, and one up to each of them. They both threw in the fifty-dollar ante and continued betting until Spencer was ready to deal the seventh card.

  Both had two hundred on the line now. And both had gotten caught up in the crowd and were talking smack. It was the final round, so betting recklessly had become the name of the game. Jessie decided to stay true to her image—go big or go home.

  “I’m all in.” She pushed her entire stack of chips to the center of the table.

  Grayson shook his head, but then scooted his chips next to hers.

  “All right folks, it’s winner-takes-all,” Spencer announced.

  Jessie turned her cards up, hoping her two pair—twos and queens—were enough to win.

  Grayson had a pair of jacks and a king showing. If he had either another jack or king, it was over. He sat for a long moment after she showed her cards. Finally, he threw up his hands and announced, “I’m out. I got nothing.” He flipped his cards facedown and conceded defeat.

  Jessie’s bullshit detector went off, but she accepted the win.

  The crowd stirred with some cheers and some boos, but everyone had fun and the room was buzzing with excitement. In the midst of the chaos, Jessie reached for Grayson’s downturned cards to see what he’d had.

  His hand slammed down on hers. “No gloating, outlaw. You won fair and square, but there’s no need to embarrass me.” He pushed all the cards together and scooted them toward Spencer, making it impossible for her to know the truth. “But the winner buys lunch.”

  She’d been right in the first place—he had a hell of a poker face. She just wasn’t sure hers was holding up so well. “I didn’t agree to lunch.”

  “I just lost fifty grand,” he said. “I think the least you can do is buy me a meal.”

  Chapter Six

  More than an hour later, Grayson finally had Jessie to himself. It had taken an evasive maneuver of military proportions to lose Lila. But after a cab ride to the Palms Hotel, he could breathe easy and accomplish a meal and a conversation with Jessie and only Jessie.

  “It’s really beautiful,” she said when they entered the Alize. “The view is just spectacular.”

  “I couldn’t take the insanity at the Masquerade anymore. Doesn’t it drive you nuts that you can’t get a cup of coffee in peace? People even follow you into the bathroom.”

  Jessie laughed. “I love it. It’s my fifteen minutes of fame. Nobody in the real world recognizes me. Or if they do, they couldn’t care less that I’m a writer. All the fans at the conferences make the effort worthwhile.”

  “If you say so.” How anyone could love that kind of insanity was beyond him. “After our poker showdown, I thought some downtime was in order. Maybe even have the chance to talk and catch up on a little business.” And to bring up the sale of the romance division. The clock was ticking down.

  She lifted a brow and gave him a wicked grin. “Here I thought it might be the personal stuff you wanted to catch up on.”

  His gaze connected with hers, probably much longer than it should have. Jessie was a stunning combination of sharp angles, dark seduction, and sex. Damned if she wasn’t right. Suddenly it was the personal questions he wanted to demand she answer.

  Why the hell had she jumped from that airplane? Why hadn’t she walked into his office even once over the last year? Most of all, who had she allowed to touch her? Stan? Someone else?

  “You okay?” she finally asked.

  He pushed the ugly image aside with an angry exhale. “Yeah.” He nodded. “Fine.” Keeping his head in the game was proving a little harder than he’d anticipated. If anything could get his focus back on business, it would be discussing Lila. “Did you tell Lila that we figured out what happened last year and called a truce?”

  Jessie grinned and nodded.

  “Thank God. The woman glares at me like I’m planning to carve out your liver and eat it with fava beans. What did she say?”

  Jessie was quiet—long enough that he suspected Lila’s words hadn’t been kind.

  “She said that I need to be very careful,” Jessie murmured. “She still suspects you have an agenda.”

  “Lila’s a total pain in the ass.”

  “Grayson!” Jessie scolded him, but laughed at the same time. “Lila’s been good to me. She’s just trying to keep me from doing something stupid. Again.”

  “Like sleeping with me?”

  She looked out the window and sipped her water. “Probably. Lila sees through me pretty well. Probably knows I can’t help wondering what if. What if you’d woken me with a kiss and a chocolate croissant? What if we’d made love again and hadn’t parted ways hating each other?” Jessie set her glass down and looked at him. “Where would we be now if it had ended that way instead of the way it did?”

  A sharp, unexpected stab of regret made him reach for his own water. He’d asked himself that very question a hundred times since last night. But he had no intentions of lying to Jessie just to smooth things over.

  “You’re not going to like this answer, but I don’t think we’d be in a much different place than we are right now.”

  Her eyes opened wider. “Really? Even if we had parted ways on friendly terms, we wouldn’t have seen each other again?”

  Christ. That was Jessie. No bullshitting around. “Jess, the night we had together was one I’ll never forget, but… ”

  She glanced away, smoothed her napkin, adjusted her silverware. Anything to avoid eye contact. Finally, she lifted a hand. “You don’t have to continue with the ‘but.’ It’s well implied. I know it’s stupid, I just thought that maybe… ”

  She dropped her face in her hands. “I’m so embarrassed,” she said. “Lila was right. I met a guy in a bar and invited him to my room. What the hell did I expect?” She finally looked up and touched his hand. “I hated you for the last year, and it was every bit as much my fault as yours. But there’s something I want you to know.” Her face flushed red. “Despite this whole outlaw image, I have never done anything like that before or since.”

  He’d silenced the guilt a million times by convincing himself that he’d just been one of many for her.

  “I don’t sleep around. I never have, Grayson. And I don’t want you to think badly of me for jumping into bed with you.”

  Her brutal honesty settled in his chest like a collapsed lung. He wrapped his hand around hers. “I never thought badly about you.”

  She raised a brow that undoubtedly said, sure you haven’t.

  “Okay.” He chuckled. “I may have tried to make myself feel better by dismissing what we had as a one night stand, but I never thought badly of you. Not for sleeping with me.” He tilted his head and conceded, “I was moderately pissed that you ran out the next morning and may have used a few unkind expletives then.”

  She squeezed his hand. “I’m sorry for whatever dumb role I played in this. But at least goi
ng forward, we can work together with no hard feelings, right?”

  Everything inside him clamped tight. There wasn’t going to be a “going forward.” Not personally or professionally. Explaining that was precisely the reason he’d brought her here.

  She turned his hand over and stroked her thumb across his palm. “Maybe we should try a do-over of that night without the horrible next morning?”

  Holy fuck. Had she just…

  Oh yes, she had. He could tell by the look in her eyes. She’d offered a repeat of their night together. If only she knew how many depraved fantasies he’d had about her she’d be running in the opposite direction instead of offering up a repeat.

  The concentration it took to keep his dick under control pretty much chewed up most of his brainpower. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember why the hell they were even here.

  The waiter approached and waved a bottle of wine next to them. At a temporary loss for words, Grayson motioned for the guy to pour, then quickly downed a glass. He had no idea if the wine was five dollars or five hundred dollars a bottle. Given the fact that they were at Alize, it was likely the latter.

  After pouring a second glass of wine, Grayson mustered all the willpower he could possibly scrape together and did the right thing. “You don’t want to be with me, Jessie. Not tonight or any other night.”

  He drank a substantial amount of the second glass before he was able to make eye contact again. “I hurt you once, and maybe that time it was by accident, but the fact is, tonight would end just like it did before. And it wouldn’t be a misunderstanding this time.”

  She looked taken aback “Why do you assume it will end badly?”

  “Because I can’t sit here and pretend that I believe in the fairy tales you write about.”

  Her eyes narrowed. She folded her arms across her chest. “I’m not stupid, Grayson. I don’t sit around with my head in the clouds and write only about rainbows and happy endings. I get that relationships don’t work out for everyone, but everyone should at least get the pleasure of reading about a happily ever after. At least until they get one of their own.”

  And that was the problem. Whether she admitted it or not, she believed in the crap she wrote about. “Why do you write romances, Jessie?”

  She hesitated, thinking about it for a moment. “Because it’s the best job in the world.”

  “No. I’m serious.”

  “So am I,” she shot back at him. “Writing about romance is a pretty great gig. For most people, there’s nothing in the world that compares to being in love.”

  “For who? For me? For you? Certainly not for Lila. This happily ever after of yours… Who does it work for? I mean seriously, how many couples stay together and in love for a lifetime. None that I know of.”

  Without missing a beat, she said, “Really? Lila told me your grandparents have been together forever.”

  He choked out an insincere laugh. One point for Team Jessie, he supposed. Good ol’ Lila. He could always count on her to fuck up a completely logical theory. “Maybe,” he conceded. Then he thought about the years following his father’s death. And how destroyed his grandparents had been. “They’ve been together for a long time, true. But I don’t think I’d classify their life as one big happily ever after.”

  Jessie shook her head. “Wow. How did someone like you, who basically has everything—money, cars, wealth, power—come to be so cynical?”

  Grayson hesitated, wasn’t sure he wanted to go there with her, but then decided what the hell. “It wasn’t hard,” he began.

  He topped off both of their wine glasses. “Let’s see, my mom was a drunk who took off when I was a kid. My dad died in a car crash when I was about ten. I was raised by my workaholic grandfather and socialite grandmother. And don’t get me wrong, they’ve been wonderful to me. But gramps has a motto: People come and go, but money is forever.”

  Jessie chuckled that low, sexy laugh that went all through him. “Alrighty then. That explains a lot.”

  “Does it?” Was she laughing at his life’s creed? “Okay, outlaw, you tell me—how does the wild child of dark and dangerous erotic romance come to believe so strongly in love?”

  Jessie picked up her wine and swirled it around, then merely shrugged. There were a million answers in her eyes. Apparently she didn’t deem him worthy of even one.

  “Come on. I shared. It’s your turn. Mommy read you Cinderella one too many times when you were little?”

  Her gaze shot to his and he knew he’d struck a nerve. Not a good one.

  “Actually, we have more in common than you think. I was mostly raised by my grandma, too. But I guess it was my parents’ romance that started it all. I remember watching them. The way they’d look at each other, or share a simple touch, it was beautiful really. They had this cool, amazing marriage.”

  “Had? As in, the past,” he challenged. “So even the fairy tale that started it all didn’t work out.”

  She shifted back in her chair with an expression he couldn’t quite read. “My dad was a doctor and did a lot of volunteer work overseas. My mom was a nurse and often traveled with him. One night the little village they were in was attacked by rebels, and they were killed.”

  “Jesus,” Grayson said.

  Jessie leaned closer, propped her elbows on the table. Close enough for Grayson to see the emotion swimming in her pretty eyes. “I was fairly inconsolable. I cried and cried to my grandma. Told her it wasn’t fair God took them both. Finally, she said something that made it tolerable. She said that we were lucky they went together. That neither one of them could have ever survived without the other. And wherever they were, they were still holding and loving each other, and that’s what we should be grateful for. I have no idea why that made me feel better, but it did. Probably because I knew it was true. Sometimes I look at pictures of them and I think, how can you not want that? How can anyone not believe in that?”

  Grayson shrugged. He didn’t believe in it. It was a touching story, but getting shot in a foreign jungle was certainly no happily ever after. And from experience, he knew that neither was leaving behind a child to grow up without parents.

  Still, Jessie’s rose-colored bubble seemed to be working for her. He had no desire to spend the afternoon poking holes in it. “Maybe it’s more a matter that some people are built for that kind of relationship, and some people aren’t.”

  “No.” She shook her head adamantly. “Everyone’s built for it. It’s simply a matter of whether or not you meet the right person. That’s what the romances are really about. Finding that one person you love enough to sacrifice for.”

  Fucking fairy tales. The woman actually did believe in fairy tales. He shook his head. “All I know is that running R and R takes more hours in the day than I usually have, and I don’t make promises I can’t keep.”

  She smiled “Fair enough.”

  “Fair enough?” he repeated.

  Her easy response should have given him a good amount of relief and a great segue into telling her about the sale of the romance line. Instead, it sort of pissed him off.

  “Do you know if the salmon is good here? I’m starving, and once we get back to the Masquerade and the ball, it’s going to be chaos,” she said. “We probably won’t have a chance to eat again.”

  “Salmon?”

  She looked at him over the top of the menu. “It’s not good? I could do the chicken.”

  Did he miss something? How the hell could she shift gears like that? “We were talking about the possibility of repeating what we had a year ago and then… salmon? I’m trying to be honest here.”

  “I know, and I appreciate it. I’m not stupid, Grayson.” Jessie set the menu down. “But if you have something more to say, shoot.”

  Why was she making this so hard? “I’m trying to be truthful because I don’t want to hurt you again. I spend every waking moment working. Not that I ever have the time, but if on occasion I do sleep with a woman, it is a one-night stand. I’ve only
been the CEO of R and R for a few months. My grandfather is depending on me. I can’t screw this up.”

  She smiled and touched his hand. “It’s a big honor that your grandfather has so much faith in you. R and R is a great publishing house. You should be very proud.”

  He didn’t know what the fuck he was missing here, but something about her response wasn’t adding up. “R and R is the one constant thing that has always been there for my family. A few months ago it became my responsibility to make sure it only gets more successful with time. You understand that, right?”

  “Of course. No hard feelings. You’re a busy guy. I get it.” She picked up the menu again.

  It was completely illogical, but the nicer she was, the angrier he became. “You get it? That’s it?”

  Heat began to flush red in her cheeks now. “Yes. I get it. ‘I don’t date. I’m too busy for a relationship right now. I just broke up with someone and I’m not ready.’ Those are classic kiss-offs that mean ‘I’m just not that into you’.”

  “That’s what you took away from this conversation?” He’d been fighting a caveman urge with everything below his beltline since he’d walked toward her in the Masquerade yesterday. “You think I’m not that into you?” He leaned close and lowered his voice. “If I didn’t want to end up in a Vegas jail, I’d bend you over this table and show you exactly how into you I’d like to get. The vision of my hands tangled in that wild damn hair of yours while your lips are wrapped around my dick is branded in my brain like some OCD compulsion that haunts me. Every. Damn. Night.”

  He grabbed the menu from her hands. “I assure you. I. Am. Into. You.”

  She sharply sucked in air, but didn’t say anything.

  “But when I get back to New York, I won’t be making arrangements to see you on the weekends because I work every weekend.” He tossed the menus off to the side. “I won’t be sending cute text messages. I don’t have the time. And frankly, I’ve seen very few relationships that don’t end up in heartache.”

  …

  Jessie was stunned. She swallowed—hard—and tried to get her breathing under control. Normally, she was fairly intuitive when it came to men, but Grayson’s mixed signals were like trying to unlock some secret code she didn’t have the key to.